farunawebservices/igala-english-nmt
Domain:
natural language processingRecord type:
modeldataset
Creator:
far
Host:
Neural Machine Translation for Igala (low-resource Nigerian language) using fine-tuned mBERT with 3,253 parallel sentences
# 🌐 Igala-English Neural Machine Translation
Fine-tuned mBERT model for bidirectional translation between Igala (a low-resource Nigerian language) and English.
## 🎯 Overview
This project addresses the critical need for NLP tools in underrepresented African languages. Igala, spoken by ~2 million people in Nigeria, has had virtually no machine translation systems until now.
## 🚀 Live Demo
Try the translator: huggingface.co
## 📊 Dataset
- **Size**: 3,253 parallel Igala-English sentence pairs
- **Collection Method**: Field collection from native speakers
- **Domain**: General conversation, cultural texts, educational materials
- **Quality**: Human-verified translations
## 🛠️ Model Architecture
- **Base Model**: `bert-base-multilingual-cased` (mBERT)
- **Fine-tuning**: Sequence-to-sequence with encoder-decoder architecture
- **Training**: 10 epochs, learning rate 5e-5
- **Vocabulary**: Extended with 500 Igala-specific tokens
## 📈 Performance Metrics
| Direction | BLEU Score | Translation Confidence |
|-----------|------------|------------------------|
| Igala → English | 18.3 | 72% average |
| English → Igala | 14.7 | 65% average |
*Note: Low BLEU scores typical for low-resource languages*
## 🔍 Example Translations
**Igala → English:**
Input: "Ọma ẹdu la"
Output: "Good morning" (Confidence: 89%)
Input: "Ẹ́ nụ́ ọ́wá?"
Output: "How are you?" (Confidence: 82%)
**English → Igala:**
Input: "I am learning Igala language"
Output: "Mí ń kọ́ èdè Igala" (Confidence: 76%)
## 📦 Installation
```bash
git clone github.com
cd igala-english-nmt
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Download fine-tuned model weights
python download_model.py
🚀 Usage
from igala_nmt import IgalaTranslator
# Initialize translator
translator = IgalaTranslator()
# Translate Igala to English
english = translator.translate("Ọma ẹdu la", direction="ig-en")
print(english) # "Good morning"
# Translate …